Wear Me

Isabel Pedersen, Canada Research Chair and Director of the Decimal Lab at UOIT, and Olexander Wlasenko, curator of Whitby’s Station Gallery, are co-organizing a wearable technology curated art exhibit and small academic symposium from September to October of 2015. The event will be hosted at the Whitby Station Gallery from September 19th until October 11th while a shorter exhibit will take place at UOIT from September 24th- 26th, 2015.

Art Exhibit

September 19th – October 11th, 2015

Whitby Station Gallery, 1450 Henry Street, Whitby, ON

The title Wear Me: Art|Technology|Bodyspeaks to the motives we hope to explore through the exhibit. The exhibit will discover a body that is constantly negotiating demands made by technology – both humanizing and dehumanizing. Wear Me imagines devices and gadgets as agents in dialogue with the human subject/body. It will probe relationships between the two such as collaboration, co-sensing, co-authorship, friendship, hegemony, nostalgia, play, surveillance, symbiosis, amelioration, parasitism, imprisonment and many other relationships. It will imagine humans and wearable components contextualized within physical, social, political, and phenomenological networks rather than in isolated subjectivity. The intent is to incite artistic exploration through provocative, playful, or challenging submissions. Station Gallery is the central location for the exhibit.

Academic Symposium

Tom Sherman holds a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2010). In 2003 he was awarded the Canada Council’s Bell Canada Award for excellence in video art. Sherman represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1980 for his interdisciplinary work that has been exhibited internationally, including shows at the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Musee d’art contemporain, the Museum of Modern Art, Festival International des Film sur l’Art, Wiener Konzerthaus and Ars Electronica.

The Wear Me symposium will encourage dialogue concerning art, wearable technology, media, and the human body in this collaborative effort between Decimal Lab at University of Ontario Institute of Technology and the Whitby Station Gallery. The focus for this symposium is to engage a humanities perspective on wearable technological devices and art, in addition to discussing academic perspectives, of how new technology is disseminated through popular media to the masses. Technologies that might be of exploratory interest for this symposium will include wearable computers, heads-up display technology (e.g., Google glass), augmented reality art worn or projected on the body, lifelogging worn devices, implants, wearable brain headsets and interfaces, wearable game controllers, and future-proposed wearable components such as digital tattoos.

Graduate Student Conference

September 25, 2015

Bordessa Hall, 55 Bond Street East, Oshawa, ON

Deadline for submissions: July 15, 2015

Wear Me imagines devices and gadgets as agents in dialogue with bodies. It probes relationships such as collaboration, co-sensing, co-authorship, friendship, hegemony, nostalgia, play, surveillance, symbiosis, amelioration, parasitism, imprisonment and many other relationships. It will imagine humans and wearable components contextualized within physical, social, political, rhetorical and phenomenological networks. Relevant research foci might include materialism, transhumanism, posthumanism, and nonhumanism contextual- ized through this wearable turn in mobile culture. Academic fields that might be hailed by this call include digital rhetoric, transhuman- ism/posthumanism, utopian studies, actor-net- work theory, quantified self, cyborg studies, digital humanities, political economy of com- munication, maker culture, futurism, and many other fields. Technologies that might be of exploratory interest for this symposium include wearable computers, display technology, augmented reality, lifelogging worn devices, implants, wearable brain headsets, Internet of Things, wearable game controllers, and future-proposed wearable components (e.g., digital tattoos), or many other instantiations of mediation.